Friday, February 28, 2014

Some years back, in his
inaugural address, Governor Brown described how “through the turmoil of
change, and sometimes chaos, Californians have pressed on toward the good
society—not for the few, not for the many, but for all”. In his address he focused on infrastructure,
social welfare, and education, remarking that California’s “public schools have
begun shoring up their curricula to meet the stern demands of an age in which
the only public cost greater than education is ignorance.”. He went on to describe a “bold program to
duplicate in ten short years a tuition-free system of higher education which
already is the best in the world”.

An inaugural address with such progressive aspirations very likely sounds
rather strange and unfamiliar to most Californians, and so it will undoubtedly
make sense to learn that it was not Jerry Brown, our current Governor, who
delivered that address, but rather his father, Pat Brown, in 1963. Pat Brown helped to engineer California’s
social welfare network, bits of which endure. He promoted higher education and K-12
education in the state, and emphasized a communitarian mode of politics in
which all members of society were asked to contribute in keeping with their
success to the welfare of society as a whole.Jerry Brown, by contrast, in his most recent tenure as Governor, has been a
major proponent of dismantling the state his father helped to build. Propelled by his ambitions, lack of
imagination, and a fanatical Republican Party minority, Jerry Brown subjected
the state to a blistering round of cuts, launching an opportunistic attack on
the public sphere which dwarfed the efforts of his Republican predecessor,
Arnold Schwarzenegger. Having hamstrung the public sphere, Brown pushed Prop 30, an initiative which
he billed as a “fix” for education in the state, but which really did nothing
more than slap a band-aid on the gaping wound inflicted by the Governor
himself. Brown has no aspirations for
California, and talks ceaselessly of limiting our ambitions and finding ways to
short-change our public sector. When pressed
on whether the state would seek to live up to its obligations to its public
universities by restoring funding, Brown referred to state funding as a “bailout”,
likening our state’s students to Wall Street titans.On Thursday, Brown
announced that he will run for re-election in 2014, which would give him a
fourth term governing California. His
announcement comprised a list of “accomplishments”, but curiously, many of
these “accomplishments” involved him making some amends for the problems he
generated with his cuts. Brown is like a
mugger, who takes $50 from his victim and then asks for praise when he returns
$10. Brown, largely by dint of out-lasting the competition with his
chameleon-like political maneuvers which today leave him governing like a faux
populist Tea Party Republican, has built up a considerable reservoir of trust
with voters and the media
(particularly that outside of California).
Some
long-time California commentators are predicting an historic landslide for
Brown.And yet Brown has chosen to do very little with this mandate. All Californians would benefit from systematic
political reform: the democratization of our voting system; the elimination of
supermajority rules; the roll-back of propositions which deny Californians the
right to make choices about their society; and the empowerment of our governing
structure, which today operates under voter-imposed constraints which prevent
our government from actively addressing voters’ concerns. Brown could choose to run on an ambitious platform which could transform our
state’s capacity for self-government and restore principles of democracy and
equality to a society increasingly dominated by elite interests and money. Instead, he’s running on a self-contradicting
policy grab-bag designed to appeal to diverse constituencies without accomplishing
anything of significance. He is
promoting fracking while eliminating the regulation that could make the
technology safe. He’s pushing a bullet
train while ignoring the ailing existing transit system, and declining to
tackle the state’s incapacity to fund such a large-scale project. He’s pushing a model of “fiscal
responsibility” which makes the working class pay the price for the anti-social
behavior of the wealthy, and allows our public institutions to become
casualties of a broken system of government which he refuses to address.Progressive voters, dissatisfied with Brown’s refusal to address the growing
inequality and gap in access to public institutions in the Golden State will
have no alternative candidate in the general election thanks to the state’s
undemocratic Top Two primary system, which will see Brown and one of two GOP
fundamentalists advance from the June election to the November ballot. I will vote in the election, because there
will be other offices sought by responsible candidates, critical initiatives,
and much at stake at the federal level.
But I will probably leave my ballot blank when it comes to voting for a
Governor, because a choice between a fundamentalist and a fundamentalist who
pretends to be progressive is not much of a choice.Pat Brown was not a perfect Governor, and progressives and right-wingers
alike could find much to critique about his tenure. But he did not give in to the temptation that
has beguiled his son: to back away from the dream of a fair society by building
up poll numbers while preaching about the need for introducing cruelty,
inequality, hardship, and social demolition in our state. In his second inaugural Pat Brown declared that “We are here to prove that a
civilization which can create a machine to fulfill a job can create a job to
fulfill a man”, pointing out that all Californians want much the same thing: “A
productive life in harmony with neighbor and nature— [which] will not be
wrought in our lifetime … But here and now we can put our hands to good work.
What we do here may not have its full impact on our own lives. Our children and
their children will be the better judges of what we do. They will measure our actions by the security
of the lives they live; by the wisdom they acquire; by the way they invest
their leisure; by the quality of the very air they breathe”.

By such metrics, Jerry Brown’s cynical campaign is very much
lacking. He should take the opportunity
to make his final tilt at high office about something more than chasing a
margin of victory. He should think a bit
longer about what he could do in his campaign to introduce a greater degree of
democracy, equality, and social responsibility into our civic sphere and
governing structure, and thence into the state he aspires to govern for a
further four years.

The Los
Angeles Times posted a story on the matter on its website, and it was
quickly mobbed by comments.Many, many
comments said something to the effect that this was Uganda’s problem and that
the U.S. should mind its own business, or that each culture has the right to
make its own decisions about morality.

What authors of those comments presumably
did not know is that the primary proponents of the bill—and earlier version of
which called for the death penalty—are fundamentalist hate groups in the United
States.Such groups, bringing financial
clout and a vicious self-righteousness, are roaming the world in search of
receptive ears now that they are on the back foot in the United States.

That they find such ears in places like
Uganda, Zimbabwe, and Russia tells us a little something about the character of
the hate groups which masquerade as non-profits and do-gooders.What Museveni, Mugabe, and Putin have in common
is a tight but never quite certain hammerlock on institutions of power based on
violence, intimidation, and a willingness to crack down on or lock up their
critics.(When I lived in Kampala,
Uganda’s capital, Museveni was ruthless in cracking down on a demonstration in
my neighbourhood...minding my own business inside the courtyard of my building,
I was tear-gassed, and at least one person was shot outside on the streets as
his thuggish police moved in.)

Regimes of this sort, particularly when
buffeted by economic problems, have a habit of trying to find an internal or
external enemy to turn their people against, lest their constituents start
scrutinising their own behaviour.In
this case, these leaders get both internal and external enemies.Backed by fundamentalist Christian hate
groups, they seek to purge their society of people they label social
deviants.And then they can rail
dementedly against the external critics of their regime as meddling
imperialists, conveniently overlooking the meddling with intent to kill
undertaken by the American fundamentalists.

One of the better-known fundamentalists
is Scott Lively, who
travelled to Uganda to talk about “the gay agenda—that whole hidden and dark
agenda”.In 2010, American visitors
to Uganda “discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often
sodomized teenage boys and how ‘the gay movement is an evil institution’ whose
goal is ‘to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of
sexual promiscuity’”.Their efforts
resulted in a proposed “bill to impose a death sentence for homosexual behaviour”.

Binyavanga Wainana, a Kenyan author who
recently wrote about his sexuality, described
to the Guardian paper the historical
roots of the intense homophobia which now festers in many parts of Africa. “‘In any forum where people discuss the issues—in
the media, or in conversation—you will quickly hear almost the exact wording
that has been distributed and disseminated in the churches”, he says...That
language was no accident.It entered
Africa in the late 1980s on the back of the heavily funded right-wing
Pentecostal movement, mostly imported from the rapture-obsessed white southern Churches
of America.‘They came in the last days
of those dictatorships in the 1980s, and they came with presidential sanction’,
he says.‘From Malawi to Zambia to here
to wherever.Those churches talked a lot
about obeying your leaders, and about the mortal dangers of decadent influences
bringing in abortion and homosexuality”.

The obsession over hatred of
homosexuality in the United States undoubtedly has similar connections to the
dying dispensation of the Republican Party, which today comprises an
unsustainable alliance between the plutocrats and the people those plutocrats
suck dry, but who happen to be religious.The plutocrats supply the critical funding, but since we’re not yet at a
stage where elections can be bought outright, they also need some constituents,
and the fundamentalists supply a good many voters on the right.

The trouble, of course, is that sooner
or later the working classes on the right—who suffer as much as if not more
from the predations of the plutocrats—will start voting based on important
economic issues rather than on social issues that do not affect them.Today, there are unaccountably people who are
more distressed by the sight of two men or two women at an altar than they are
by the economic inequality which grips our country, and the hijacking of our
democracy by the super-rich. But that
won’t be true forever.

Today, though, in the same way that
Robert Mugabe, Yoweri Museveni, and Vladimir Putin attempt to silence dissent
with their savage attacks on the sexual orientation of some of their citizens,
the Republican Party is trying to hold together what will ultimately prove to
be an untenable alliance by inciting discrimination, bigotry, and hatred against
some of our fellow citizens.

Sunday, February 16, 2014

The University of California at Berkeley
won the reputation that has dogged or adorned it—depending on your perspective—for
decades with the Free Speech Movement, anti-Vietnam War, and Civil Rights
protests of the 1960s and 1970s.The
protests associated with those causes gave a harder, political edge to an
institution already known across the country for its academic excellence.The protests catapulted a B-actor best known
for doing commercials and snitching on his colleagues to the Governorship of
what had recently become the most populous state in the union and, thereafter
the Presidency.The protests helped to
revitalise the Republican Party by providing it with a narrative about
something supposedly wrong with American culture.

Ronald Reagan famously whined about “beatniks,
radicals and filthy speech advocates”, joining with J Edgar Hoover to paint a
picture in the mind of the public of students as uncouth, ungrateful,
ill-informed, and destructive.Their
behaviour, Reagan suggested in the campaign that propelled him to an electoral
victory over Pat Brown—probably the greatest booster of the state in its
history—was gratuitous and emblematic of an indulgent generation who had
wandered away from the moral rectitude of their predecessors.The smears that he and the FBI director
cooked up (the subject of Seth Rosenfeld’s book Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to
Power) downplayed the political nature of the student movements and
focussed on the supposedly aberrant and riotous behaviour of students in the
1960s.

But evidence suggests that disorder on
campus was nothing new.Rosenfeld’s book
describes an episode known as “the great panty raid” wherein 3,000 members of
fraternities rampaged from one sorority to the next “while groups of them
forced their way inside, ransacked bedrooms, and grabbed undergarments.In all, twenty-six women’s living quarters
were invaded, and some doors and windows were broken.One woman repelled the intruders with a hot
iron, and hysterical phone calls lit up the police switchboard”.The police took it all very casually, and the
administration—perhaps foreshadowing the reprehensibly casual attitude of today’s
administration toward sexual assault—accepted assurances that no real physical
harm had been done, merely $12,000 in property damage (Rosenfeld 60-61).

Rosenfeld remarks that such outbursts
and the massive property damage associated with them were regular occurrences
at Berkeley.John Kenneth Galbraith, who
spent some of the 1930s in Berkeley, recalled “walking along Piedmont at night
[and hearing] the shouts of laughter from within [the fraternities], or
occasional bits of song or what Evelyn Waugh correctly described as the most
evocative and nostalgic of all the sounds of an aristocracy at play, the crash
of breaking glass” (Galbraith in Berkeley!
A Literary Tribute 52).

This was Berkeley before the post-war
democratisation of higher education, which took some time to alter the social,
economic, and racial homogeneity of the University which had long functioned as
a club for the children of elites.What
it proves is that it was not so much the “disorder” associated with the sixties
that upset the likes of Reagan and Hoover as it was the change in formerly
quiescent students’ politics.It was one
thing for students to scream and yell, light bonfires in the streets, assault
young women, and destroy property if they were just working off what was
regarded as good adolescent steam.Boys,
after all, will be boys, went the view.What was less palatable was when some of those boys, and girls, too, started
to make noise with a purpose.Worse
still, when that purpose threatened the social, economic, and political status
quo of the state.

And so the very behaviour which a
generation earlier had been “condoned and even admired” by alumni and the
faculty according to Galbraith (52), was suddenly very frightening to the
political right whose offspring had formerly dominated the university.It had to be redefined without reference to
the students’ actual political claims—that would have allowed them to build
bridges to the wider community which was equally affected by the political
witch hunts, the war in Vietnam, and the drift away from social democracy.

Rather, students’ behaviour had to be
redefined in a way which destroyed their legitimacy, tarred their personal
character, and suggested that they, rather than the fast-rising political
right, were the ones posing a threat to the American way of life.And so Ronald Reagan colluded with the FBI to
do precisely that, and he launched waves of cheap, mean-spirited assaults on Governor
Pat Brown and President Clark Kerr, two essentially decent men who took
seriously the welfare of students in their charge.

Not so Ronald Reagan, who eagerly gave
orders for police and National Guard military units to escalate violence on
campus, effectively waging war on California’s youth for having the temerity to
take to heart the University’s injunctions to political liberty and their own
hard-won freedom of expression.Students
fell to the truncheons, guns, and tear gas of the forces of “law and order”,
who hadn’t ever bothered to turn out when 3,000 students were launching what
amounted to a mass sexual assault just a few years earlier.

And Kerr and Brown fell to Reagan’s
savage, scorched-earth brand of politics, and the illegal methods of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, ushering to a close the era of consensus about
the value of California’s public institutions.

In his reflections onhis Berkeley years, Galbraith described as “a
singular accomplishment of American higher education” the “control system”
operating at American universities—public and private alike.That structure “subtly suggested that whatever
the students most wanted to do—i.e. devote themselves to football, basketball,
fraternities, college tradition, rallies, hell-raising, a sentimental concern
for the old alma mater and imaginative inebriation—was what they should do”,
because “some deeper adult instinct suggested [that this behaviour] was a
surrogate for something worse” (Galbraith 52).

Something like applying the things they
learned in their studies to the world around them, finding that world sadly
wanting, and advocating for political change.

Protest, idealism, and politics...these
things, students are subliminally instructed, are for naive dreamers who will
never change the world.To want to be
good is to aspire to weakness and irrelevance, and therefore to fail.Better, they are told, is a ruthless
application of the technocratic skills increasingly emphasised at the
University, to mow down problems facing their generation as they prepare to
assume greater responsibility for our state, our nation, or the world. Those skills, the story goes, can be applied
without reference to political and moral frameworks.

Today, political consciousness at the
University of California’s first campus smoulders rather than rages.But in spite of the beatings meted out by
campus and city police over the years, and through all the decades of attacks
on the motives and character of the University’s students, and although the
myths about the change represented by the 1960s protests endure...in spite of
all these things, there are some students at Berkeley and elsewhere in the
University of California who understand what it means to participate in a
democratic, public system of higher education and are prepared to act on the injunctions
the existence of such institutions provide them to act in a political and moral
fashion on the world around them.

Friday, February 14, 2014

Forget the 2016 Presidential race. In 2014, voters in the most populous state in
the union will set out to elect a chief executive. The Governor of California operates with considerable
constraints imposed by decades of accumulated checks on their power imposed by
California’s voters, but the position remains the most important in the
state.

Californians will be in an unenviable
position, faced with a veritable rogue’s gallery of candidates who range from
outright loons who feel more threatened by a same-sex couple than by the
spectre of economic inequality, to those interested in further enriching the
1%, to those who evince a total disinterest in actually living up to their
responsibilities to govern the state. The
field of candidates remains in flux, but thanks to California’s expensive media
markets and large voting population, will likely settle into place shortly.

Nonetheless, he stuck it out for a good
several months in the race, under some pressure, no doubt, because his leading
contender for the nomination was an out and out nut.

The obligatory fanatic in the GOP race
was Tim Donnelly, who crawled out of his Government-proof bunker in southern
California to take his particular brand of insanity statewide. An Assemblyman best known for carrying a
loaded weapon into an airport and for being obnoxious to his colleagues in
Sacramento, Donnelly espouses the garden-variety slash-and-burn approach to
California’s public sphere which characterises his party.

Donnelly’s website claims that he is a
“patriot, not politician”, an absurd claim on the face of it. His not very novel argument is that the
“government” is “wasteful”, and that therefore instead of investing in the
common good, we should free up the corporate world in order that it can exploit
us more and thereby funnel our money to that Oh-So-Efficient private sector
that crashed the economy and plunged the country into recession. Which, I suppose, if you’ve drunk enough of
the kool-aid, makes much more sense than investing in people’s education,
health, and economic security in times of hardship.

One of Donnelly’s big concerns is
“Freedom”. Lest you be confused, when he
talks about “Freedom”, he means the freedom to be exploited and cheated by
insurance industries, and the freedom to fail through no fault of your
own. A proud signatory of the Anti-Tax
pledge whereby representatives hire out their brains to corporate interests and
give up the use of their little grey cells, Donnelly espouses the simpleton’s
economic policy: “Cut, cut, cut. It’s
that simple”, he promises on
his webpage. “In the Assembly”, he
boasts, “I have voted NO on EVERY tax increase and will veto any tax increase
as your governor”. In other words, no
matter what the future holds, Donnelly’s Crystal Ball reassures him that we
will NEVER need any more money to invest in our public sector.

What they needed was someone who didn’t
start foaming at the mouth at the sight of an immigrant, who can talk about
taking punitive measures against the middle class in a nice, comforting voice,
and who isn’t out to appeal to “single-issue
voter[s] on the gun issue”.

Kashkari is the kind of dishonest
right-winger who has no problem shedding crocodile tears over the condition of
our schools and universities while pretending we can afford to cut taxes and
continue to starve them of revenue.

His “policies”? “Transform[ing] our state’s public schools by
ensuring that the money that taxpayers send to Sacramento actually gets into
the classroom—not wasted in layers of bureaucracy” (without bothering to
provide any evidence that “waste” is actually the problem); and “promot[ing a
higher education] system that focuses on student outcomes and embraces new
learning technologies that will transform traditional methods of delivering
education, while making higher education more affordable”; and “embrac[ing] the
advantages of our state’s natural resources through safe and environmentally
conscious energy development while also unlocking the potential of all of our industries
to grow and create good jobs”.

You know you’re in trouble when your
policy page makes Tim Donnelly look like a wonkish intellectual. Anyone can write a fuzzy wish list. I’m assuming, in the absence of evidence to
the contrary, and given his unabashed enthusiasm for that hoax called the “Free
Market” (which actually involves regulating the market to the benefit of
corporate interests), that Kashkari’s program will involve further cuts to the
public service, cuts to school funding (from the fundamentalist perspective,
teachers are “waste”), and outsourcing the duties of our universities to
for-profit online educational profiteers who think you can conduct an
intelligent seminar conversation through the ether and work in a science lab
online.

Eager not to be outdone in terms of
lunacy by Donnelly, Kashkari
proceeded to blame our drought on Jerry Brown. There are plenty of things for which our
prevaricating Governor deserves some blame.
But for standard bearers of the party which has opposed investment in
California’s infrastructure to blame the drought on the Governor is pure
buffoonery (and also ignores the fact that the reason why the state has not
been building more dams is that there are no longer any viable locations,
leaving groundwater management as the best option).

The one thing you could not accuse their
opponent of is being removed from the political process. Our current Governor, unchallenged Democratic
candidate for 2014, and likely next Governor, is the indestructible Jerry
Brown, who has been in public life in California in one capacity or another for
most of the years since 1969.

Brown’s philosophy of government
involves snuffling after poll numbers and revolves around the notion that “he
who governs best governs least”, giving me the impression that he would be more
at home in the Republican Party than in a supposedly progressive party. Brown is driven not by the fundamentalism of
the GOP, but rather by a kind of sad laziness and fatalism. He prefers to see political problems as
incurable conditions, a worldview which conveniently absolves him of any
responsibility to take action.

So this is what passes for “choice” in
California, a state of extraordinary diversity and talent. None of these individuals has the guts to say
anything about political reform measures which could free California from the structural
straitjacket in which it now operates, allowing us to make better choices in a
more democratic fashion about our future.
One of the candidates wants to take us back to the nineteenth century,
and neither of the others can offer anything better than platitudes by way of
transitioning into the twenty-first century.

The election will offer entertainment of
a sort, but at the end of the day, the joke is on California’s public for
constructing a political system which empowers fringe nuts, forbids the entry
of dissenting voices into prohibitively expensive political contests, and offers
such a paucity of imagination in a state with an embarrassment of talent.

If these clowns are the best we can
muster up, we clearly need to re-write the job description.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.